My experiences? Even though I have terminal cancer, even though it will cut my life short—I was given eight years to live 10 years ago and I'm still here—would I change anything?
No, I wouldn't. If I had been better informed of some of the risks at the time, I would have taken some precautions, but I wasn't, so I can't change that. In fact, my son is in the military, and I'm proud to have him in the military.
What I am not happy with is the way veterans like me have had to deal with Veterans Affairs, because once you leave the Canadian Forces and start with Veterans Affairs, you're a nobody. You have to prove that you exist to them to start. We fought for 10 years just to get a pension, because they looked for absolute causation. They did not follow the pension rules. They did not follow the Pension Act. In fact, the Federal Court wouldn't even take their case; they gave it to us, because they were so abysmally bad.
You may have seen us: we were on the national news with regard to that. My wife had to stage a sit-in just to get a pension, and we got it for medical mismanagement. You have 300 pages; VRAB got thousands, and none of it had to do with medical mismanagement, but that's what the minister—at that time Minister Blackburn—awarded us. It took two weeks for his legal people to look at it, look at all our evidence, and say, “Okay, this is medical mismanagement” and give us a pension.